Temple Treasure

We awoke to a glorious day in Luxor, a bright blue sky, with an early morning chill in the air. Our favorite taxi driver...Mostafa (his spelling not mine)...dropped us off at the Luxor Museum just as it opened. We encountered 2 other tourists & a group of local school children whilst there. This is sad because it is a VERY good museum & not too big. Quite manageable without getting overwhelming. Highlights for me were; a golden cow Hathor head (so tempting to sneak the camera out here but I was good!!)....wonderful textures representing hair & fabric decoration carved into alabaster...an unknown mummy, discovered in Niagara Falls, bought by a man in Atlanta, Georgia & then gifted to the Luxor museum!(What a journey!)...some of King Tuts funerary equipment; a linen shroud decorated with 637(?) golden rosettes,....an actual cubit measure...architects plans for Rameses 9 tomb...a beautiful box with its lid off revealing the canonic jars within...an offering plate with diagrams inscribed to show where you should place fish, bread & oils! SERIOUSLY disappointed that they didnt have a good postcard range, we are going to have to hunt down a book!!!!! From the Luxor Museum we walked to Karnak which was very pleasant along the corniche & didn't take long at all, although we did disappoint all the horse & cart drivers who would have liked to have taken us..for a price. Karnak temple was HUGE & for the first time since we arrived in Egypt we encountered bus loads of tourists. OOODLES of them, we were stunned! And like spoilt children who have become accustomed to having ancient monuments to ourselves...we were not happy!!!! But what a place! Main pleasures for us were the avenue of ram headed sphinxes, the paint work in the great festival temple (some wonderful bright colours still remaining...my favorite,the Botanical garden, where Amonhotep had carved into the walls images of all the different plants he brought back from his battles in syria....the little temple of Khun...and a series of black basalt sekhmets in the outdoor museum. Oh, and one mustn't forget the sacred scarab, which we were supposed to walk around several times for good luck, but we didn't bother!